alt Hacker NewsJokes and Humour in the Public Android API
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My favorite funny function in the Android source is android.os.Handler.runWithScissors() [1] - but (unfortunately) it is not part of the public API.
[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
For X11, from the top of my head:
The global variable that toggles a bunch of legacy cruft is called "party_like_its_1989": https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/di...
The changelog for the DRI2 extension is "Awesomeness!", "True excellence", "Enlightenment attained" etc: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/dri2proto/dri2proto.t...
Reminds me of BeOS (and now Haiku), which have "is_computer_on()" and "is_computer_on_fire()" both with great descriptions.
https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...
If you want to test the isUserAGoat and isUserAMonkey on you own device, I published this small app that does just that: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy...
Maybe I can add these other easter eggs...
> a hidden column in the Chrome task manager that shows how many goats a browser process has teleported
Was very dissatisfied to find this no longer works. Here's an old post with a screenshot: https://www.100-geek.net/articles/goats_teleported?action=ar...
From 234 columns to 16, what a purge.
I miss the era of easter eggs in tech products. Kinda went away with the corporatization of everything.
I want to make replying to this thread a requirement for anybody I'm interviewing to hire. Also for anybody interviewing me. Truly a "2 kinds of people in this world" moment.
This means jokes and humour in technical documentation. While it's often frowned upon, I love a bit of humour in docs. I wrote about this here:
these get into logs, metrics, API contracts. now you're explaining isUserAGoat() to a partner team in a quarterly review. nobody’s laughing then
funny thing is, linters catch unused vars but not unfunny ones. maybe we need a linter that flags joke names after 90 days. if it’s still funny, you keep it. else rename and move on
Love the Lost (TV show) reference as well as the value of the constant.
There is an additional Lost reference in https://developer.android.com/games/pgs/leaderboards
Also https://developer.android.com/reference/android/service/auto...
How isUserAMonkey API came about: https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA...
The `<blink>` tag was an official part of early HTML standard, until teenagers showed up online and sanity prevailed. I suspect this could have been there to maintain compatibility with older webpages.
public static final String DISALLOW_FUN
Source: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManag...
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How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings on Android?
Is there anything similar in the public iOS API?
On OpenVMS, DCL (the shell and main scripting language of choice) had this as an exit code.
$ exit 2928 %SYSTEM-W-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels
The Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System: link isn't working :(
Looks like they finally set DISALLOW_FUN to true by default in latest Android release.
This is why I refuse to use android
Notice how pretty much none of these are added in the last 10 years?
Android's become 'more mature' - ie. Boring, and the joke to code ratio is dropping rapidly.
How is someone writing an article about Android source code node nerdy enough to know what a Tricoder is? I don’t buy it
For many years at FB, suffixing dangerous or really-deprecated tokens with `_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` was the standard. Everyone[^1] was in on the joke.
In the middle of the pandemic when ~50% of the workforce had started post-2020, it and other things became complaints for causing fear/uncertainty. We didn't do the best job on-boarding remote people and making them feel part of the culture at that time.
[^1]: It was a big company so this statement could only be true in the circles I had access to.